Emmanuel Macron’s dangerous bid to unmask Marine Le Pen

By Lionel Laurent

French President Emmanuel Macron, humbled by the drubbing administered by far-right nemesis Marine Le Pen in European elections, is rolling the dice on his government, his credibility and his legacy.

By calling snap parliamentary elections, he’s counting on the French “waking up” to what Le Pen actually stands for as tensions with Vladimir Putin’s Russia rise. But the risk is that this backfires and leads to more gridlock that neither benefits Europe nor restores Macron’s appeal.

Macron clearly feels there’s no other response to elections that seem to confirm the lame-duck status of his pro-Europe, pro-reform movement in the twilight years of his second and final term.

Le Pen’s roster of candidates got 31.5 per cent of the vote, more than double Macron’s and a score not seen in 40 years. Doing nothing would mean accepting a less central role on the European Union stage – in its parliament, at least – on top of a gridlocked national legislature where he’s lacked a majority since 2022. And the inevitable countdown to a President Le Pen in 2027.

Taking the fight to the far-right, the thinking goes, will expose Le Pen and her 28-year-old No. 2 Jordan Bardella as being all opposition and no proposition. It’s been hard to glean what the National Rally stands for after years of dropping its most toxic policies to widen its appeal.

It no longer wants to quit the EU after the mess of Brexit, yet does want French exceptions to EU law. It no longer wants to quit the Schengen free travel area yet wants a “dual border” for France and the EU involving systematic checks.

It no longer supports retirement at 60 yet doesn’t support Macron’s hike to 64 either. All rather vague and estimated by one think tank to add over €102 billion a year in public spending.

Macron perhaps also hopes to craft a united front out of slabs of the center-left and center-right — respectively scoring around 14 per cent and 7 per cent in Sunday’s vote — and strike a chord with the kind of silent majority that rallied to Charles De Gaulle after the May 1968 student protests.

But it’s a hell of a gamble. The strong showing for Le Pen’s party in European elections indicates support far beyond the anti-Semitic xenophobic incarnation of her Holocaust-denying father’s original vehicle or the anti-globalist populism of her 2017 presidential bid.

Luc Rouban, author of a book analyzing support for Le Pen, found she appealed to those who had difficulty paying their bills and also to those who had a hunger for authority and executive power. Both the left behind and the well-off, in other words.

Which is why there’s a high likelihood that these snap elections will look less like 1968 and more like 1997, when center-right president Jacques Chirac lost his own snap election and had to work with a left-wing government.

A leaked internal poll in December for the Republicains (the current incarnation of Chirac’s party) estimated that Le Pen’s group would become the biggest party, potentially even with an absolute majority.

The possibility of naming Le Pen or Bardella prime minister might very well be part of a plan by Macron to get them to own policy failure — or at least marginalise left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon — but that approaches wishful thinking more than strategy; what’s more, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is proving pretty adept at stoking culture wars while taking care not to spook markets.

Nobody should wish yet more political uncertainty on France and Europe at a critical moment for the war in Ukraine, trade with China or the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House.

The outcome could see investors rethink their assumption that Europe inevitably advances in crisis and that closer financial integration is a given. “Macron is asking the French: ‘Do you really mean it?’” says Catherine Fieschi of the European University Institute in Florence.

“It’s a dangerous question to ask.” Rather like Britain’s Rishi Sunak, who is also mounting a monthlong campaign to paint his rival as the devil voters don’t know, Macron may find this next election fight to be a particularly lonely one.